Despite Fervor for Bhutto, Close Pakistan Vote Seen

After sweltering for more than three hours in the Sind Desert sun, the human mass exploded in a deafening torrent of chants and rose petals as their charismatic leader took the stage.

“Benazir Bhutto, your name will live as long as the sun and moon remain above,” screamed the tens of thousands of turbaned men, veiled women and wild-eyed children last week, as the woman who would be prime minister beamed and waved to them from under a virgin-white veil.

An Islamic mullah read a prayer. A dozen local politicians shouted promises. The crowd chanted, “Prime minister--Benazir; prime minister--Benazir.” Half a dozen people fainted in the surge.

Finally, the 35-year-old woman who is now challenging the decade-old regime that executed her father, exiled her mother and kept her in prisons for years stepped to the microphone to issue a campaign appeal that she has repeated scores of times in villages and towns throughout this south Asia nation during the past several weeks.

“Listen to the voice of the martyrs--the men and women who have fought against the tyrants for 11 years,” Bhutto shouted to a crowd that hung on her every word.

“On Nov. 16, I appeal to you to take the revenge of the poor. You have suffered the atrocities of this regime of tyrants. You have been lashed, jailed, shot and hanged. Now, your time has come. Drive the oppressors and usurpers from their throne and bring the people back to power.”

Hours later, her face badly sunburned and her voice a croaky whisper, an exhausted-looking Bhutto sipped tea from a cup bearing her pink monogram, “B.B.,” and told a small group of reporters, “It is a real wave. The people are demanding change and, God willing, on Nov. 16 change will come to Pakistan.”

But political analysts and veteran independent observers in this nation--America’s best and most strategic ally between Israel and the Philippines--are not so certain.

Close Contest Predicted

As 48 million Pakistani voters prepare to go to the polls Wednesday in what is expected to rank among Pakistan’s freest and fairest elections ever, political experts are predicting that the national legislative polls also are likely to be the closest in the nation’s history.

Despite the enormous popular surge for Bhutto and the huge crowds that have worshiped her throughout Pakistan--hundreds of thousands formed a human sea in a downtown park to see her in the politically critical old capital of Rawalpindi on Thursday night--recent polls show her Pakistan People’s Party running neck and neck with a nine-party coalition of ruling political leaders handpicked by Bhutto’s nemesis, the late military strongman President Zia ul-Haq.

“Benazir is the media star, so this is going to be viewed as Benazir’s election,” said one senior Western diplomat based in the capital, Islamabad. “But there are a lot of subtleties in Pakistani politics.

Potential Violence Seen

“This is a very complicated . . . political scene. And the biggest danger now is what could happen if Benazir loses. She already has a ready-built platform for saying she was cheated if she loses, and the potential for violence from her long-suppressed, emotional and committed hard-core supporters definitely is there. And that kind of violence easily could bring the army out again.”

The complexity of the situation lies in the simple fact that Bhutto is not running for president. She is just one of 1,300 candidates running for the 217 seats in Pakistan’s national assembly.

In order for her to become prime minister, her party must win either a majority of those assembly seats or, if no single party wins, enough of a plurality to force the nation’s president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, to invite it to form the new government.

“It is difficult for Americans to understand this system,” said one senior Pakistani bureaucrat who, like most observers here, is worried about world reaction if the internationally popular Bhutto fails to take power.

“But one way to illustrate it is, if America had our system, Michael Dukakis would be President now. The Democrats control both houses of Congress, so the Democrats would form the government.”

Party Could Easily Lose

But there are many other factors in Pakistani politics that not only illustrate the nation’s current situation but also help explain how Bhutto’s party easily can lose Wednesday even though she certainly will win her own assembly seat.

Taken together, analysts said, those subtleties have made this election more of a classic Third World battle between money and emotion, pragmatism and ideology, than the struggle between dictatorship and democracy that Bhutto has cast it as in her campaign speeches.

In the countryside, where two-thirds of all voters live, Pakistan has for centuries been a feudal society in which a handful of powerful landlord families have controlled all aspects of life--from marriages, land disputes and local political leaders to the sites for future roads, schools and hospitals.

In three-fourths of the country’s electoral districts, for example, relatives of just 20 old, feudal families are contesting for seats.

Politics in Pakistan, which was carved out of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 as a separate Islamic state, also are dominated by religion. In rural villages, an ancient Sufi culture dominates, and local living saints, called pirs , who are believed to have mystical powers, also are contesting the elections. Most are considered almost-certain winners.

Patronage, Power Politics

In the cities, where a Tammany Hall-style system of patronage and power politics has become firmly ingrained, it is the local ward healers--rich industrialist-politicians who have faithfully attended neighborhood funerals and weddings and won pork-barrel government projects--who are expected to win Wednesday.

Although Bhutto’s party did put many such landlords, pirs and local bosses on its ticket--a political strategy that also alienated many of the grass-roots supporters of her late father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto--most such powerful figures have sided with the nine-party alliance that is Benazir Bhutto’s principal opposition.

The leader of the Islamic Democratic Alliance epitomizes what Bhutto is up against.

At 38, alliance leader Nawaz Sharif is a self-made billionaire whom Zia handpicked to run Sind, the most populous and powerful of Pakistan’s four provinces, a job that Sharif has continued to hold since Zia’s death last August in a plane crash--and to exploit throughout his campaign.

Bears Gifts

Although Sharif’s barnstorming national tour has been largely ignored by the media, it has evoked popular responses as huge and almost as emotional as Bhutto’s--but for far more pragmatic reasons. Everywhere Sharif has gone, he has been bearing gifts.

He has promised dozens of hospitals, schools, roads, clinics, orphan’s centers, salary increases, free home lots and other projects that total tens of millions of dollars.

His style of campaigning has been equally unabashed. As all political parties must in an illiterate nation where three-fourths of the population cannot even read candidates’ names, Sharif’s alliance has adopted a campaign symbol that will appear on the ballot beside his party’s candidates. The symbol is the bicycle, and, at several rallies, Sharif has spoken from the seat of a 20-foot-high, 30-foot-long bicycle that he had built in one of his many family-owned factories.

As for their treatment of Bhutto, her family and their People’s Party, Sharif and the other parties in his alliance have been harsh, some might say vicious.

Bhutto’s mother, the widow Nusrat Bhutto, also is running in the elections, and Sharif has capitalized on the backgrounds of the two women, both of whom were educated in the West and who spent years in exile in London and Paris.

“Those who eat French bread in Paris restaurants--what do they know about life in this village?” Sharif has shouted to peasant crowds dozens of times during the past three weeks of campaigning, neglecting to mention that he himself has spent most of his time in his many posh houses in the country’s major cities.

“These ladies are going to wreck the economy again. These ladies are going to sell this country to the Indians. These ladies are going to bring back the butchers and boozers of Bhutto,” Sharif has added, exploiting the most sensitive issues in Pakistan.

Nasty Campaign

Harsher still is the campaign being waged against the Bhuttos by the country’s most fundamentalist religious party, the Jamaat-i-Islami, which has joined Sharif’s ruling Pakistan Muslim League in the Islamic Democratic Alliance.

On the cover of the most recent issue of the party’s magazine is a photograph of Nusrat Bhutto dancing with former U.S. President Gerald R. Ford. Beside it is a photo of Benazir Bhutto bearing the caption, “This woman modeled for contraceptive ads in London.” Above both is the question, “Do we want this family back?”

A prominent Pakistani journalist, Hussain Haqqani, who is supporting the ruling alliance in the election, explained the campaign of money and mudslinging.

“You must see it in the context of Pakistan today,” he said. “This is all part of democratic evolution. This is the first party-based election in 11 years in a largely illiterate and deeply religious nation that has had so few elections in its history.”

Nonetheless, although it is unlikely to break through the barriers of traditional Pakistani politics, the image that clearly has captured the imaginations of most people, here and abroad, is that of Benazir Bhutto’s campaign for peaceful revenge through the ballot rather than the bullet.

For Bhutto, a graduate of both Harvard and Oxford universities, the battle lines are mainly ideological--democracy versus dictatorship. In the process, though, she has cast it as something of a contest of ghosts between her late father and the late dictator Zia, who had her father tried and executed in 1979.

She has used the campaign to defend and praise her father’s six-year term as prime minister in an attempt to prove that she is capable of governing and to clear the family’s name.

‘Raised the Prestige’

“The People’s Party raised the prestige of Pakistan during its six-year rule, and we made great sacrifices,” Bhutto declared to her huge audience Thursday night.

Trying to blunt Sharif’s charges that the Bhuttos are pro-India, Pakistan’s eastern neighbor and opponent in three wars, Bhutto declared, “Prime Minister Bhutto said we will fight against India for 1,000 years--even if we have to eat grass.”

And, routinely, she also has attacked Sharif and his ruling elite, calling them thieves, usurpers and tyrants, but always casting them as the remnants of Zia’s 11-year military regime.

Like her opponents, though, Bhutto has spent little time discussing the critical issues facing Pakistan. Domestically, the nation is in the throes of economic and social crises, which include rampant heroin use and production, ethnic and linguistic unrest and surges of armed violence.

Internationally, Pakistan’s extensive role as a source of arms and logistical support to the moujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan, its western neighbor, is at a critical stage as the Soviet Union has suspended its troop withdrawal.

But such neglect of the issues comes as little surprise when one reaches the average Pakistani voter.

In the ancient Rajah Market of Rawalpindi, for example, Adnan Gulkhan, 23, summed up the thoughts of many grass-roots voters.

“Yes, this is a very important election,” said Gulkhan, who, along with his uncle, owns an old electronics shop in the market. “So I am listening to all the candidates’ speeches and giving it much thought.

“On election day, though, I will just see which party will give me my rights and which one will most benefit me personally.”

Fineman, The Times’ Manila bureau chief, is on assignment in Pakistan.